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Description:Current issues are now on the Chicago Journals website. Read the latest issue. Established in 1939 and published for the Southern Political Science Association, The Journal of Politics is a leading general-interest journal of political science and the oldest regional political science journal in the United States. The scholarship published in The Journal of Politics is theoretically innovative and methodologically diverse, and comprises a blend of the various intellectual approaches that make up the discipline.

The Journal of Politics features balanced treatments of research from scholars around the world, in all subfields of political science including American politics, comparative politics, international relations, political theory, and political methodology.

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Abstract

AbstractWe isolate two limitations of the existing literature on representation and then move toward some important remedies. The first limitation is that typical representation studies assess the extent to which policymakers’ issue positions correspond to those of the public, but do not investigate whether the issue priorities of policymakers correspond to those of the public. The second limitation is that existing studies do not consider the full policymaking process, from agenda setting to enactment. Using data provided by the Policy Agendas and Congressional Bills Projects, we investigate how well the public's policy priorities have been represented in national policymaking over a 47-year time period. We first assess public concern about 18 major issues using Most Important Problem data (1956–2002) and then correlate these concerns with changing issue attention across 10 policymaking channels that are ordered by differences in institutional friction. We find much closer correspondence where friction is low.